This year with Covid and all that, I have been messing around with repurposing 'stuff', some of it acquired cheaply for various reasons, and some from my old parts bins.
The USB card, is actually a small aluminium box.
The Front panel has
a 3.5mm Mic In socket and
3.5mm sockets for:
Line In,
Front Out,
Rear Out and
CEN/BASS Out.
The Rear panel has a single mini USB port that I used to assume was probably for Power. It came with Windows drivers only and once the customers ordered new machines I just forgot about these things.
Well, early this week I plugged the little blue box thing into a spare Min USB cable (getting hard to find around here) and plugged that into one ofmy Mint 20 computers. Then I looked at the pavucontrol settings (mixer).
Mint recognised the card immediately as: CM106 Like Sound Device. So far so good.
I unplugged the individual speaker system cables from the splitter in the Logitech Bluetooth Adapter and plugged one into the socket marked Front and the other into the socket marked Rear. I rebooted the system rather than messing with pavucontrol settings - just out of curiosity.
On reboot, the Bluetooth Adapter light stayed RED (inactive) but I had Audio.
I fiddled with a few settings on pavicontrol, and found the nicest sound happened with pacucontrol set to:
CM106 Like Sound Device Analogue Surround 5.1
It also turns out that despite the thing having a Line In socket - sound goes in through the USB port that I expect also powers it.
Sound was not much different than having the two Logitech X-230 systems plugged into the Splitter on the line out jack of the Bluetooth Adapter.
However the available Volume was considerably higher, meaning I could dial down the internal Amps on the little Logitech satellite speakers.
Out of curiosity I unplugged the speakers that live behind me from the Rear Out socket, and plugged them into the Cen/Bass Out socket.
The overall sound seemed richer, so it could be interacting with the Subwoofer in the rear set of X-230s. I do know there are what look like some High and Low Pass frequency circuits inside (sets of capacitors/resistors)
It was an interesting exercise that gives me a weird 'immersive sound' where no matter which way I face I have a distinct Left and Right channel.
It does sound 'interesting' playing one of those test videos that says 'Left Channel - Right Channel' over and over, when i slowly turn and the left and right channels swap almost imperceptibly depending if I step forward or back. (Because I have the satellites set up like that deliberately).
I can live with that, because it is not a real 'Surround Sound' system. It is however a nice 'Immersive' sound, and makes use of a piece of cheapo tech that many people probably have lying around.
The CM106 boxes can still be found on ebay and Amazon - sometimes for less than $10, and could be great for getting someone's cheap computer or laptop that has lousy sound and/or volume - up to something like usable.
